1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to personal information management systems and more particularly to an integrated personal information management system including a paper planner, a personal digital assistant (PDA), and a digital pen.
2. Description of the Background Art
The term “personal information manager” or “PIM” is often used to refer to software or other tools or systems that are used to manage an individual's calendar, contact information (address/phone book), task lists, and notes. In this document, the term “personal information manager” or “PIM” is used in a broader sense to indicate any tool or system that an individual uses to help with the management of his or her calendar, contact information, notes, task lists, and other personal and/or business information.
There are three broad categories of PIMs on the market today. The first category is paper-based planners (sometimes referred to herein simply as “planners”). Planners are traditional paper-based calendar and contact management systems, as exemplified by the Franklin Planner system, the Day-Timer System, and the Day Runner planner system.
The second category is personal digital assistants, or PDAs, which are small handheld computers, typically having a touch-sensitive screen and a stylus which is used for input. The term “PDA” (or “personal digital assistant”) generally applies to a stand-alone handheld computing device used primarily for managing calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, e-mail, and the like. Examples of PDAs are the Palm computer from Palm, Inc. and the iPAQ Pocket PC from Hewlett Packard. PDAs can be used to store, display, and/or manipulate various personal information including, but not limited to contact information, calendar information, and the like. Such information can be downloaded from other computer systems, or can be input by way of a stylus on a pressure sensitive screen of the PDA or by way of other types of input devices such as mechanical keyboards or voice recognition modules. More recently, a new generation of cell phones with certain PIM capability has been introduced into the market. As these new cell phones (known as “smartphones”) include many of the features of PDAs, for purposes of this discussion they are also included in the PDA category of personal information managers. In the following discussion, the term PDA is used in a broad sense to include traditional personal digital assistants as well as similar computing devices (including cell phones with PDA features) and associated accessories and structures.
The third category of PIM is a personal computer (PC)-based solution. In this case a desktop or laptop computer together with associated application software such as Microsoft Outlook is utilized to provide functionality similar to that described above as provided by a PDA. This functionality includes the ability to store, manipulate, and display contact information, calendar information, and the like on the PC. The PC or laptop supporting the PIM application is typically significantly larger than a PDA in terms of physical size and also employs greater CPU and memory resources. However, PC-based PIM systems also have many of the same limitations of PDA-based systems as described below. They also have other disadvantages such as increased size, price, and complexity.
Each of these categories of personal information management systems has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages, and when selecting a system to use for personal information management, consumers find there is no perfect solution. The advantages and disadvantages of each type will now be briefly summarized.
Traditional paper planners have several advantages, including comfort, simplicity, and familiarity. Using a pen to record information on a piece of paper is an input process that everyone knows. Because practically everyone has written with pen and paper since childhood, there is nothing new to learn in order to use a traditional planner. The traditional planner provides a simple, familiar, comfortable environment that imposes a minimal impediment to the flow of ideas. Traditional planners also offer flexible, personalized use. Planners tend to become very personalized documents as each user develops his or her own particular style. A user may include notes in the margins, diagrams and/or annotations in the notes area, or special symbols next to phone numbers to differentiate friends from clients. He or she may also write at angles, circle or star important items, or include receipts, newspaper clippings, or letters tucked into the pockets or between the pages of the planner. While the printed forms provide structure and guidelines for usage, users are free to customize and improvise. The planner enables a user to be creative and to personalize the tool, rather than requiring the user to adapt to the information management tool.
A traditional planner is also easy to navigate. Users are accustomed to the process of flipping through pages and intuitively understand that a larger number of pages corresponds to a larger number of days. The familiarity, flexibility, and ease of use of planners are some of the traditional advantages of these tools compared to more recent PDA and PC-based technologies.
These advantages are, however, offset by several disadvantages. First, the traditional planner typically provides no safety net to the user. Losing one's planner is nothing short of traumatic for serious users. A user rarely, if ever, keeps a “backup” of his or her planner. Accordingly, if the planner is lost or stolen, all of the phone numbers, addresses, dates, lists, plans, ideas and other information retained in the planner are irretrievably lost in most cases. This wrenching experience leaves the user with no choice but to start from scratch, reconstructing data from memory, and probably never recovering all of the information. For a user storing personal information in the planner, this can be extremely upsetting and annoying. For one storing business and career information in the planner, the loss can also have significant financial repercussions as valuable and irreplaceable contacts and plans are often lost with the planner.
A paper planner also provides only limited search capability. It provides no easy way to find a particular phrase or item of information if the user does not recall the date or some visual cue about the page the data is on. The paper planner also provides little or no automation. Recurring events must always be entered by hand, leaving open the possibility of losing or forgetting birthdays, anniversaries, or other important dates, appointments, or meetings. In addition, one can only comfortably fit a limited number of calendar pages into a planner, so accessing information from the past or from future dates (e.g., dates in the following year) is difficult if not impossible. The planner also provides no automated task management—tasks not completed on a given day must be manually carried forward to the next day. It also does not facilitate sharing of information. For example, there is no easy way to view a spouse's calendar, and no way for an administrative assistant to view or modify a user's calendar. Additionally, the paper planner provides no way to cut and paste information between the calendar and e-mail. Given that so many people regularly work with personal computers and other automated devices, having to manually track everything in a paper planner is inefficient, inconvenient, redundant, and time consuming.
With the advent of PDA- and PC- based PIMs, a number of these problems have been addressed. Users can backup data from their PDA or PC to other systems, thereby guarding against the loss of this data. PDAs and PCs also provide search functions that enable a user to find any word in any of their data as well as other automated features including automatically distributing recurring events throughout the calendar, and automatically carrying forward incomplete tasks to the next day. PDA- and PC-based calendars can also be shared, and may include alarms to remind the user of events. However, these new features are provided together with a new set of problems.
The process of entering data into the PDA is one of the main complaints of PDA users. Few users find the tactile experience of using a stylus on a plastic screen to be enjoyable. But this is a minor point compared to the inefficiency and inconvenience of having to enter text using an artificial writing system like Graffiti, or having to peck out letters on a tiny on-screen keyboard or add-on keyboard. Although various efforts have been made to improve data entry features of PDAs, users continue to find the data entry process to be complex, difficult, and generally unpleasant.
PC-based PIM systems provide a partial solution to some of these data entry problems. For example, the Tablet PC from Microsoft addresses some of these data entry problems by enabling a user to write with a stylus in his/her own handwriting on a larger screen. This improves the experience of interacting with the computer via a stylus to some extent. However, the user is still left with the unpleasant tactile experience of writing with plastic on plastic. Also, the user is required to write larger on the screen than they normally would write on a piece of paper because the lines formed on the screen are fatter (i.e., thicker) than the line left by a normal pen, and the handwriting recognition software works poorly with smaller writing. Worse still, the user must learn to navigate a complex, multi-modal “Input panel” so that the Tablet PC can discern handwriting input from cursor movements, “right clicks”, and gesture commands. For these reasons, writing on a Tablet PC does not compare favorably to the easy and familiar process of writing on paper with a pen. Tablet PCs (as well as laptop computers and other types of PCs) are also usually much bigger and heavier than planners or PDAs. In fact, a general disadvantage of all tablet, laptop, or desktop PC-based solutions is that these devices are typically heavier and less portable than either PDAs or paper planners and are also typically more complex and more expensive.
PDA- and PC-based PIMs offer very little flexibility. One generally must use the PDA or PC and the accompanying software in the way in which these components were designed. There is little or no opportunity to personalize the capabilities of the PDA or PC. For example, a user cannot make notes in the margins, fold over the corners of important papers, tuck other papers between pages, or circle important items. PDA- and PC- based PIMs typically provide a rigid set of features to be used in accordance with specified procedures. Moreover, these features can be cumbersome to navigate. Instead of intuitive, tactile pages and tabs, navigation on a PDA or PC must be accomplished by clicking cryptic on-screen icons or by using various combinations of buttons.
While the advent of PDA- and PC-based PIMs resolved many of the shortcomings of the paper planner, some advantageous features were lost, and several new problems were introduced. Today the PIM market remains divided, and the question of which PIM solution is best has no definitive answer. Each of the current approaches is subject to significant problems and limitations.
One recent attempt to address some of the shortcomings of current PIMs is the Franklin Covey iScribe, which is intended to work with an optical digitizing pen from Logitech called the “lo”. This product combination allows users to write on special paper using a special ballpoint pen, and transfer a digitized version of their writing back to a PC running iScribe software. The iScribe software, in turn, provides integration with Microsoft Outlook such that users can view within Outlook the information which they entered on paper in their planner. Although this design does allow users to write on paper, the iScribe product does not truly integrate digital and paper planning, but rather creates a limited one-way link from the paper domain to the digital domain. No handwriting recognition capability is provided, and even if a handwriting recognition application was used on the PC, the user has no feedback while writing about whether the handwriting recognition application on the PC will correctly interpret what they are writing. Thus, for everything the user has written, the process of reviewing the resulting recognized text is a distinct extra step which must be performed at the PC. This is inconvenient and time-consuming. Also, the planner provides no access to information that resides in the digital domain; users can merely transfer what they have written in their planners into the digital domain (e.g., into Microsoft Outlook on the PC).
The Seiko SmartPad takes yet another approach, allowing a user to insert his or her PDA into a folio which includes a paper notepad and a special pen which can digitize what is written on the pad. Information written on the pad is transferred into the PDA in graphic form such that it can be attached to events or contacts, or simply saved as individual documents. This approach allows the user to have access to digital data via the PDA interface, and to enter freehand drawing data into the PDA using pen and paper. But here again, there is only very limited integration of the paper and digital domains. The SmartPad product integrates a blank pad with a PDA, instead of integrating a fully functional paper planner with a PDA. Thus, instead of a hybrid product with the best features of PDAs and paper planners, the product offers only a rudimentary capability to use the paper to enter drawings into the PDA. With the SmartPad, there is no way to create new events or contacts working from paper. The user has only a small lined notepad on which to enter data, and there is no handwriting recognition capability provided. Also, the SmartPad device has no ability to discern one page from another. In addition, the user must write in an artificially large style in order to produce legible results on the PDA. There is also no way to control the PDA from the paper. Therefore, the user is forced to alternate between using a stylus on the PDA screen and using a pen on the paper pad.
What is needed is a tightly integrated solution that combines the best features of each of these existing solutions. The solution should allow the user to enter data in his or her own handwriting, perform handwriting recognition on the data entered, provide quick feedback on the recognition process, and allow the user to instantly make any needed clarifications or corrections. It should allow the user to enter new data, such as appointments, contacts, tasks, and notes in a familiar, simple, and intuitive way based on the already-familiar paper planner usage model, and should provide intuitive navigation through the data that is entered. The solution should also provide full access to the user's digital data, such as documents, email, and events entered via a PC or PDA instead of via the paper and digital pen. At the same time, it should enable data to be shared with others, integrated with other devices, and automatically backed up at regular intervals. The solution should also automate normally tedious and error prone processes and should provide for automated search capabilities. Ideally, the solution should, to the greatest degree possible, accommodate the working style and systems of the user and allow for personalization of the PIM system. It would also be advantageous if the solution cost less and were more rugged than a PC or Tablet PC. The present invention provides a solution for these and other needs.